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Reminder to commemorate war, not celebrate it

PETER LLOYD: The former prime minister, Paul Keating, has used a Remembrance Day address to warn against a jingoistic interpretation of the Anzac (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) legacy. Instead, he's urging people to focus on the stories of the troops who fought.

Military historians agree that a shallow interpretation of the Anzac legacy runs the risk of celebrating, rather than commemorating, war.

Eliza Harvey reports.

ELIZA HARVEY: Paul Keating delivered a eulogy at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1993.

PAUL KEATING (Archival): We will never know who this Australian was. We do know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front, one of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service in the First World War. He's all of them. And he's one of us.

ELIZA HARVEY: Twenty years on, the former prime minister was again reflecting on the men involved in the bloody battles of World War I.

As the rain crackled on his umbrella, Mr Keating urged Australians to grapple with the complexities of the soldiers' stories.

PAUL KEATING: I'm greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend, and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last 100 years.

But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here, and our responsibility in continuing to improve it. Homage to these people has to be homage to them, and about them, and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.

ELIZA HARVEY: Author and commentator Paul Daley thinks it's a sound warning on the eve of the World War I anniversary celebrations.

PAUL DALEY: The glorious sacrifice and these euphemisms we use to kind of disguise the horror of it. I mean the politicians are forever talking about the fallen. Well these men died, they didn't fall. They didn't trip over in the garden.

ELIZA HARVEY: How do we have an honest discussion in Australia about a respect for those who have gone before us but also an awareness of the seriousness and often the horrors of war?

PAUL DALEY: The service records have been online for some time now, and through them and the medical records we can actually find a picture, paint a picture of what happened to some of these men when they came back. Those who are undiagnosed with post traumatic stress, for example, which was absolutely rampant; those who took their own lives, there were many of them. Telling the story of what happens to men in war.

I don't know that these men saw themselves as - I don't know that they would have thought that they were willingly sacrificing themselves. I think they were going to war to do a job. But I don't think they sort of saw themselves in the same ecclesiastical terms that they're often described with.

ELIZA HARVEY: Paul Ham is an Australian military historian.

(To Paul Ham) Do you believe that the Anzac spirit, so to speak, has been overshadowed by jingoism?

PAUL HAM: Yes, Mr Keating's precisely right. You can't go through Anzac Day without hearing it or experiencing it in some form. There is also a kind of, what should be a commemoration, in some people's minds seems to be turning into a celebration.

I hope they're celebrating those qualities that Mr Keating talks about. But I also detect a sort of rather sinister celebration of all things Aussie, as if somehow we broke the Hindenburg Line, as if somehow we delivered the free world. You know these absurd sort of ignorant ideas about the past.

ELIZA HARVEY: Author Peter FitzSimons in on the committee advising the Federal Government about centenary celebrations.

(To Peter FitzSimons) Is there any evidence to show that we as Australians have become too obsessed with maybe a confected notion of the Anzac spirit rather than the realities of war?

PETER FITZSIMONS: I think occasionally it veers that way, yes. I think we should be focusing on the valour of the individuals and what was achieved. It's not a day for jingoism. It's not a day for beating our chests. It should be more a day for quiet reflection.